Grokkist Press
Reading Room
Snackables
Things we found elsewhere and pass on: a film, a tool, an essay, a corner of the old internet. A few lines on why, then off you go. New ones join the shelf as we find them, newest first.
22 Mar 2026
A case for a religion that doesn't ask you to believe the right things but to show up and practice. Modern Quakerism is almost purely orthopraxic: sit in silence, pay attention, speak only if something real needs saying. At its centre is a simple claim — there's a part of you that already
Read the note ↗22 Mar 2026
TVGuessr drops you into live TV streams from around the world and asks you to name the country of origin. A small, oddly absorbing window into how ordinary broadcasting looks and sounds elsewhere.
Read the note ↗22 Mar 2026
French illustrator Romain Joly plays with simple elements — drawing, photography, everyday objects — turning them into visual jokes or nudging them into new forms. A reminder of how little it takes to make the familiar suddenly strange and delightful.
Read the note ↗8 Mar 2026
'Iran has been trapped in a cycle of self-love and self-hate for centuries, and nothing captures that contradiction like The Blind Owl.' Banned both before and after 1979, the novel follows a troubled painter through a surreal, fragmented narrative. Amir Ahmadi Arian traces its strange aft
Read the note ↗8 Mar 2026
Artist Steve Parker's Funeral for a Tree, made after a 65-year-old live oak in his yard died of oak wilt. He cut the trunk into circular slices and turned them into playable records encoded with birdsong from the species that once roosted in its branches — a slow memorial where wood, air a
Read the note ↗8 Mar 2026
'Your inability to focus isn't a moral failing. It's a design problem.' Humans have fretted about declining literacy for centuries — from Thomas More to penny dreadfuls to comic books. Carlo Iacono argues the real issue isn't screens but the environments built around them: notifications, i
Read the note ↗8 Mar 2026
A four-minute mockumentary having fun with 'enshittification': the slow degradation of digital platforms as companies shift from delighting users to maximising extraction. Released alongside the Norwegian Consumer Council's report Breaking Free, it sketches how the pattern shows up across
Read the note ↗22 Feb 2026
Paleoanthropologist Ludovic Slimak pushes past the 'Neanderthals were basically us' rehabilitation to something more unsettling: what if they were genuinely different — different minds, different relationships to territory and meaning? He suggests their disappearance followed a collapse of
Read the note ↗22 Feb 2026
A podcast in which a journalist investigates entrepreneurship in the AI age by trying to run a real company staffed by fake (AI) people. Somewhere between investigative journalism and deadpan performance art — no breathless futurism, no moral panic. It quietly shows how much of 'running a
Read the note ↗22 Feb 2026
Many world-changing innovations don't begin as grand visions of progress — they begin as small acts of care for a specific human constraint. Here: a surgical nurse's chemical-burned hands. Her boss commissioned custom rubber gloves to protect them; only later did anyone notice infection ra
Read the note ↗22 Feb 2026
A tiny web game that shows you a name and asks you to guess whether it's a Tolkien character or a modern antidepressant. Far harder — and funnier — than it has any right to be.
Read the note ↗22 Feb 2026
A boy throws his kite into a tree. To retrieve it he throws his shoe. The shoe gets stuck, so he throws another shoe. Then a ladder. Then a paint can. Then a whale. Oliver Jeffers' Stuck is a children's book with an impeccable sense of escalation — and a suspiciously accurate model of how
Read the note ↗